Airtel, Income tax complete first phase of TAXNET

NEW DELHI: Taxpayers would soon be able to file their tax returns with a click of the mouse.

The Airtel Enterprise Services and the Income tax Department today announced the completion of the first phase of the all India 'TAXNET' project.

The 'TAXNET' project is an initiative of the Ministry of Finance and one of the largest Information Technology projects undertaken by the Government of India. On the completion it will be India's largest ever Virtual Private Network (VPN) connecting all the Income Tax offices in 745 locations in 510 cities across the country. The connectivity would be on the Bharti MPLS backbone.

Airtel is partnering with IBM for implementing the project. IBM is undertaking the system integration for the project.

“TAXNET will lay the foundation and provide impetus to growth of e-governance not only within Income Tax Department but also within the country. We are looking at all round efficiency gains for the Department and creating a simpler and easier tax filing process for citizens,” Member Income Tax- (Investigation and Computerisation), Government of India, J.G. Pendse said.

Pendse said that the objective is to provide taxpayer services through web as a single window 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so that a taxpayer can fulfill his routine tax without visiting Tax offices.

Through this network 13,000 users of the department will be able to access the centralised database.

Joint managing director, Bharti Tele-Ventures Limited, Akhil Gupta said that project is set to provide the Income Tax Department with a state of the art IP-VPN MPLS data network. With all department locations getting networked, it would be possible to connect the offices of the department to the National Data Centre (NDC) on a common centralised database. The entire project would be completed and would be rolled out in June 2006.

Airtel, which is implementing the project on Build-Own-operate basis, is setting up a modern state-of-art MPLS IP VPN Network. The network, with a uptime of 99 percent on end-to-end basis extending from PC node up to NDC, will ensure secure encrypted date flow. The first phase of the project connects 170 locations, which will be going up to 745 locations under Phase II. The total value of the five-year contract is around Rs 240 crore.